Did you think Goat Simulator was the weirdest animal game to release this year?

It has some competition in the form of Hatoful Boyfriend, a parody of dating games where you attract potential avian suitors instead of humans, and after years of cult acclaim in Japan is finally seeing a release in the West.

As the only human student at a prestigious institute for talented birds, the story plays out much like classic choose-your-own-adventure books, where choices such as which pigeon to chat to and what classes to attend see the story spiraling off in various directions.

You'll ultimately arrive at a number of bizarre outcomes, from triggering the apocalypse to getting into role-playing style boss battles.

While Hatoful Boyfriend is definitely a silly game — one of our play-throughs had us trying to befriend a jock pigeon who had an obsession with pudding — there's gripping, wider mystery at play that will apparently make sense of everything.

"There's the absurdity of the premise which is what drew us to the game in the first place, but actually there's an awful lot of depth," Mediatonic's business development manager Helen Burnill told Digital Spy at this year's Radius Festival in London.

"It's not just about who you're chatting up — about is it going to go well, or is it going to go badly — but there's an awful lot of unraveling involved, such as what the hell is going on in the world, and why am I dating pigeons?"

As with other visual novels — and role-playing games like the Persona series — how you decide to manage your time is important. Certain choices bestow bonus stats to your character, which trigger exclusive conversations and lead to different storylines and unique endings.

Replayability is a big part of the game — there's a fast-forward button in the upper right corner that allows you to skip to the next choice in the story — and each path has its own unique story information that helps explain the wider mysteries of the world.

Hatoful Boyfriend became a cult classic when it was released in Japan back in 2011, and while it swiftly saw an English fan translation, today it's difficult to source and harder to play since the game doesn't run on modern operating systems.

Working with original creator Hato Moa, this Mediatonic-developed remake aims to be as faithful to the original as possible.

While the backgrounds have been redrawn with higher resolutions in mind, the pigeon artwork remains untouched, and the translation is being handled with care.

"We are doing a little bit of tidying [to the translation], but we think we can go too far when you're trying to over-localize when it's a game like this, it replaces a lot of the original charm," Burnill explained.

Mediatonic and publisher Devolver Digital aim to release Hatoful Boyfriend on PC this summer, and since it's being built using the Unity engine, it means an appearance on other platforms could be on the cards.

"We're initially going to take it to Steam — the end of July is what we're shooting for — but what a lot of people are asking is, 'Do we want to take it to other devices?" Burnill said.

"This allows us to do that down the road."

Watch a fan play-through of Hatoful Boyfriend's original Japanese release: